-SOLVED- ACU Upgrades are unbalanced

[Nombringer]

Disregarding balance completely (It's perfectly fine IMO)

The cybran ACU is all well and good, however there is an inherent lack of decision making present in it's upgrades.

In most games the cybran ACU has only one real choice; gun or tech two.

Stealth-Cloak/Teleport/RAS:

Stealth is a very nice, very cheap and a complete and utter no brainer as soon as you have the opportunity. It's cost means you are very rarely having to decide between radar stealth and any of the other back upgrades, RAS, cloak, or teleport. While I love the upgrade, and think it fits very will with the faction in general, you are never really having to 'choose' it over another.

Cybran RAS, once again, is very rarely called upon to make a decision with, the other two contenders at that time if the game are Cloak, that cannot be offorded until RAS is almost obsolete, and teleport, that suffers from the same problem.

Now we come to the only other two upgrades that occupy the same timeframe within the game as each other, full stealth, and Teleport. While full stealth can arguably be afforded before teleport, it use is limited to an anti-snipe mechanism. By the time you can afford this both you and your opponent will have the necessary power to make tech three air, and no matter how much health it gives you, you will be unable to use it in order to fight land units, even coupled with a mazer, because as soon as the enemy brings out a single tech three scout or Omni. It could be used in order to minimize the risk of staying in a firebase and attempting to defend it, however, due to cybrans shields, point defense, and artillery, it is simply a waste to have a large firebase at the point in the game when you can of aford this upgrade. In short, this upgrade is simply to useless to occupy a regular game. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but it is simply not worth it.

The only upgrades occupying the cybran ACU late game, are Tekeport and mazer, the timeframe where other upgrades are position'd simply mean's that I am never 'Choosing' anything, other than gun and tech two

Torpedo's/mazer:

Torpedo's are another great an unique upgrade, stuck along the same arm as.... The mazer!? There is simply no situation I can think of that actually calls for a decision to be made between these upgrades. By the time you can afford a mazer, the time for torpedo's is completely over.

I would love to hear people opinions on if they think this is okay, and hypothetically, what they would do to encourage more diversity in the upgrades to the cybran ACU.

[rxnnxs]

Well my opinion is (after i know now that the gathered experience will stack) that you can easily use all the good things the cybran possesess.. but you have to switch in late game.
so you can begin with cloak and the gun upgrade, later with the torpedo if you go into the water. even before you go in the water, you may decide to go to tech2.
later then, you switch to the mazer and get rid of the torpedo of course. before you do that, you do the cloak upgrade also.
the mass&energy you put in the gun upgrade and the torpedo before in case you switch to the tech2 & then tech3 or/and the mazer is so tiny, so laughable late game, it is a flee shit compare to the energy you need for the laser mazer microwave whatever you call it gun.
it would be hard the other way around that is a no go..:
when you decide to go in the water and make the torpedo launcher when you already have the laser. haha, THAT would be a no go..
also it would be a totally wate when you decide to change from tech3 to a gun upgrade because you feel like shooting around a bit in late game... but here it would be not THAT expensive.
try fighting with a cybran against a seraphim with both fitted out for a fight in the field. who wins? if the laser hits good, its the cybran.
needless to say that the cloak is not affecting anything because the ACUs see always the cloaked. but the HP and regen rate is important here...
if the laser is not hitting fast enough, the seraphim wins..
if you want a video where i constantly miss, tell me. but dont argue with me when i use fraps for it..

[rxnnxs]

update: sorry, it os not reproducable.
who is interested, here are two test games i made so far. they are.. replays
there is no shooting in the dirt, this is straight forward shooting in the head..!

hey, do not expect something great

[Shinzok]

You do know that upgrading your ACU to T3 takes huge amounts of mass / energy , yes ? there is no way you can get T3 on ACU without also having a freaking booming eco. Atleast not before the other ACU gets those 120 kills.

Cause you can get that much kills within the first 5-10 minutes

[Mycen]

Mycen, please, can you tell me/us how you aim in a better way?

I'm no coder, so I don't know how it would work. My point was simply that I'm sure someone can recode the ACU mazer so that it is more accurate. Seeing as the ML mazer does not point into the ground whenever the ML is moving, the same must be possible for the ACU. But as to how to implement that fix, I don't know, sorry.


Nombringer, I don't agree with your point about "choice". To begin with, brushing cloak off as "limited to an anti-snipe mechanism" seems like an odd thing to say - almost completely removing the possibility of a snipe seems pretty darn valuable to me. If you have air superiority, or even local air superiority, the cloak+mazer can be effective for defending your base against experimentals. (Except GCs, obviously.) Saying it's not a real choice is not true. Also, going by what you describe, there isn't much "choice" involved in the other ACU upgrades either. Most of the upgrades are only useful at certain points in certain types of games, and of the ones where there are real tradeoffs, there aren't more than two or three - not a big difference compared to the Cybran one. I don't really think that it's a big deal that upgrades become 'obsolete' at different points in the game, it makes sense.

Again, the primary role of the ACU is to command everything else, not participate in combat itself. So for the endgame configurations of ACUs to boil down to one of only a few configurations is fine by me. I personally don't think that the ACUs should be emphasized more than they already have been by the changes to the deathnuke, overcharge, etc.

[ColonelSheppard]

So what exactly is underpowered for cybran com? I only see you complaining about no tech + gun and the lower hp

Sorry but saying the cybran commander is up because of that is ridicolous, i see some replays but they arent showing anything in the terms.

So excuse me but in this 4 sites of dicussion icant find a single viable agrument for your statement

[rxnnxs]

Just to make it easy for those who do not want o really waste their time in reading the whole thread:
No problem anymore.
I was arguing that the gun upgrade and the tech upgrade are unbalanced.
you can not gain as much HP/s and extra HP when you go for the gun upgrade and try to stay there.
problem i did not know is: experience does stack. so if you go for another upgrade, you take the experience with you, no matter what you do change at your commander.
anyway, as argued above, even i you manage to kill 120 enemies in the first minutes, a commander that has upgraded to T2 at that time (and if he is not spamming out canonfodder for the enemy the commander can not make his kills) is better off with his t2 abilities and those HP/s and HP bonus. he does nto have to kill for this and has only invested approx. twice as much energy+mass. and no risk in being killed that way.
this also is true for the aeon commander who also has this problem..

then i was talking about the microwave laser the cybran has and was testing if the misbehavior i observed many times can be reproduced in short. no, i was not able to reproduce this bug. all of you know how the monkey sometimes shoots in the dirt or has a fire malfunction. also he is sometimes shooting when there is no enemy but is shootin in the sand while walking..
anyway, i am through with this because i will adapt my playstyle, ha, funny.
i upgrade the subject to:

- SOLVED - ACU Upgrades are unbalanced update: NOT

Problem solved?! who knows...
But if you read through all this mess I produced, you'll find out..

[rxnnxs]

just to add this:

General anti air change:
All dedicated anti air units and structures target Experimental air units in priority

Land units:

ACU:
T3 engineering suit regen reate fixed:
NewRegenRate = 35, (from 15)
RAS upgrade:
mass output = +13 (from +14)
Energy output = +3800 (from +3300)
...
link

what i want to say here is, that the regen rate for t3 is fixed, i do not kjnow why. typo or just to slow before?
this compared with the regen when you have managed to kill120 is.. you know what I mean